Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips 26 years ago today I married Karen. It was the smartest thing I ever did.

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by Dwayne Phillips Handwriting is not dead. It lives on despite the computer age. Cursive, however, is on the way out, and I for one am happy to see it go. (Start writing comments about how bad a person I am) Time magazine mourns the death of handwriting. That is a nice headline, but I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Most organizations have “magic words.” Utter these words and things happen. If you don’t know the words, work slows and frustration rises. None of this makes any sense, but nonsense continues to exist and often thrives. Years ago, a colleague who lived in a nearby rural area wanted to construct a building […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In spite of everything I know about technology, I remain confident that our government is not watching us. There is simply too much incompetence built into the bureaucracy to accomplish such a lofty goal. Consider this blog post a public service announcement: The American government is not watching you. The government isn’t […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I return to some of my technical roots this week. I am experimenting with the OpenCV image processing and computer vision library. This is fun. This is a “techie” blog post. Many years ago I worked with image processing. I did this work in graduate school and then wrote a lot of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is easy to draw incorrect conclusions on cause and affect in organizations. One of the major reasons for these bad conclusions is time. Good organizations will succeed and bad ones will fail in time. I have yet to find a way to predict how much time that is. Google is in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I dislike most meetings as they are not a time to accomplish work but merely a time to socialize. The worst type of meeting is one that is going to be short. Short meetings waste more time and last longer than any other type of meeting. I dislike the majority of meetings. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Shortcuts have always led to more work for me, not less. The past two weeks have emphasized that to me. They have also taught my a new definition to “shortcut.” Sorry, there is no magic here. Wiktionary.org: A path between two points that is faster than the commonly used paths; A method […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Producing a lot of documentation doesn’t ensure project success. Sometimes, when emphasized incorrectly, a lot of documentation can ensure project failure. Keep in mind the purposes of documentation. This week during one of those little lulls that occur in even the busiest of endeavors, an engineer and I were chatting. For some […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The computer has become the learning appliance. Don’t believe me? Just ask my six-year-old niece. So what do schools do now? “What are you searching?” That was a simple question. Last weekend I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee visiting with relatives. I was sitting in front of my portable computer studying and modifying […]

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